Blogging to peak in 2007 says Gartner

Analyst firm Gartner predicts that the number of blogs on the Internet will …

The blogging "trend" could reach its peak in 2007, according to a recent Gartner report. The prediction came as part of a larger report of the group's top 10 predictions for 2007 and beyond and speculated that the number of active bloggers would hit its all-time high in 2007, leveling out soon thereafter.

Chief Gartner fellow Daryl Plummer pointed out that "a lot of people have been in and out of this thing. Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it." Indeed, most people who start blogs don't keep them up forever, and Gartner says that there are now 200 million ex-bloggers.

However, the company says that the number of bloggers has been steadily growing over the years, and will peak at 100 million bloggers next year. Blog tracking site Technorati defines an "active" blog as one that is updated once every three months, and announced that it was tracking 57 million blogs as of this October, making the "blogosphere" over 100 times larger than it was in 2003. The rate of growth has begun to slow though, according to the company—the number of tracked blogs is now only doubling once every seven-and-a-half months or so, compared to doubling every six months as it has in the recent past.

Gartner says that the reason for the slowing in growth and the predicted leveling off is because most people who would ever use blogs already have, while others who may have been attracted to the growing trend initially have gotten bored and moved on.

There is some disagreement with this reasoning among—you guessed it—the blogging world, some of whom argue that much of the world's population has yet to get online and have the opportunity to start (and quit) blogging. For example, a large majority of China's population has yet to have regular access to the Internet, but the country already boasts 17 million bloggers, with plenty of room to grow.